Get started guide

Cloudflare Queues is a flexible messaging queue that allows you to queue messages for asynchronous processing. By following this guide, you will create your first queue, a Worker to publish messages to that queue, and a consumer Worker to consume messages from that queue.

​​ Prerequisite: Create a Cloudflare account

In order to use Queues, you need a Cloudflare account. If you already have an account, skip this step.

​​ 1. Enable Queues

Queues is currently in Public Beta Open external link .

To enable Queues:

1. Log in to the Cloudflare dashboard Open external link .
2. Go to Workers > Queues Open external link .
3. Select Enable Queues Beta.

Queues is included in the monthly subscription cost of your Paid Workers plan, and charges based on operations against your queues. Refer to Pricing for more details.

​​ 2. Install Wrangler

You will use Wrangler, a command-line tool for building Cloudflare Workers, to access Queues.

To install Wrangler, ensure you have npm Open external link and Node.js Open external link installed.

Use a Node version manager like Volta Open external link or nvm Open external link to avoid permission issues and change Node.js versions. Wrangler requires a Node version of 16.13.0 or later. Install Wrangler by running:

$ npm install -g wrangler

or install with yarn:

$ yarn global add wrangler

Queues requires Wrangler version 2.2.1 or higher. Run wrangler version to check your version:

$ wrangler --version
2.2.1

With Wrangler installed, you will now create a queue.

​​ 3. Create a queue

To use queues, you need to create at least one queue to publish messages to and consume messages from.

To create a queue, run:

$ wrangler queues create <MY_FIRST_QUEUE>

Choose a name that is descriptive and relates to the types of messages you intend to use this queue for. Descriptive queue names look like: debug-logs, user-clickstream-data, or password-reset-prod.

Queue names must be 1 to 63 characters long. Queue names cannot contain special characters outside dashes (-), and must start and end with a letter or number.

You cannot change your queue name after you have set it. After you create your queue, you will create a Worker to access it.

​​ 4. Create a Worker project

You will access your queue from a Worker, the producer Worker. You must create at least one producer Worker to publish messages onto your queue.

To create a producer Worker, run:

$ wrangler init <WORKER_NAME>

In your terminal, you will be asked a series of questions related to your project. For the question Would you like to use TypeScript? (y/n), indicate y. This will create an index.ts file in your project directory’s src folder where you will write the code needed for your Worker to access your queue.

​​ Bind your producer Worker to your queue

In order to expose your queue to the code inside your Worker, you need to connect your queue to your Worker by creating a binding. Bindings allow your Worker to access resources, such as Queues, on the Cloudflare developer platform.

To create a binding, open your newly generated wrangler.toml configuration file and add the following:

[[queues.producers]]
 queue = "YOUR_QUEUE_NAME"
 binding = "MY_QUEUE"

Replace YOUR_QUEUE_NAME with the name of the queue you created in step 3. Next, replace MY_QUEUE with the name you want for your binding. The binding must be a valid JavaScript variable name. This is the variable you will use to reference this queue in your Worker.

​​ Set up your producer Worker

You will now configure your producer Worker to create messages to publish to your queue. Your producer Worker will:

1. Take a request it receives from the browser.
2. Transform the request to JSON format.
3. Write the request directly to your queue.

In your Worker project directory, open the src folder and add the following to your index.ts file:

src/index.ts
export default {
  async fetch(req: Request, env: Environment): Promise<Response> {
    let log = {
      url: req.url,
      method: req.method,
      headers: Object.fromEntries(req.headers),
    };
    await env.<MY_QUEUE>.send(log);
    return new Response('Success!');
  },
};

Replace MY_QUEUE with the name you have set for your binding from your wrangler.toml.

If this write fails, your Worker will return an error (raise an exception). If this write works, it will return Success back with a HTTP 200 status code to the browser.

In a production application, you would likely use a try-catch Open external link statement to catch the exception and handle it directly (for example, return a custom error or even retry).

​​ Publish your producer Worker

With your wrangler.toml file and index.ts file configured, you are ready to publish your producer Worker. To publish your producer Worker, run:

$ wrangler publish

You should see output that resembles the below, with a *.workers.dev URL by default.

Uploaded <YOUR-WORKER-NAME> (0.76 sec)
Published <YOUR-WORKER-NAME> (0.29 sec)
  https://<YOUR-WORKER-NAME>.<YOUR-ACCOUNT>.workers.dev

Copy your *.workers.dev subdomain and paste it into a new browser tab. Refresh the page a few times to start publishing requests to your queue. Your browser should return the Success response after writing the request to the queue each time.

You have built a queue and a producer Worker to publish messages to the queue. You will now create a consumer Worker to consume the messages published to your queue. Without a consumer Worker, the messages will stay on the queue until they expire, which defaults to four (4) days.

​​ 5. Create your consumer Worker

A consumer Worker receives messages from your queue. When the consumer Worker receives your queue’s messages, it can write them to another source, such as a logging console or storage objects.

In this guide, you will create a consumer Worker and use it to log and inspect the messages with wrangler tail. You will create your consumer Worker in the same Worker project that you created your producer Worker.

To create a consumer Worker, open your index.ts file and add the following queue handler to your existing fetch handler:

src/index.ts
export default {
  async fetch(req: Request, env: Environment): Promise<Response> {
    let log = {
      url: req.url,
      method: req.method,
      headers: Object.fromEntries(req.headers),
    };
    await env.<MY_QUEUE>.send(log);
    return new Response('Success!');
  },
  async queue(batch: MessageBatch<Error>, env: Environment): Promise<void> {
    let messages = JSON.stringify(batch.messages);
    console.log(`consumed from our queue: ${messages}`);
  },
};

Replace MY_QUEUE with the name you have set for your binding from your wrangler.toml.

Every time messages are published to the queue, your consumer Worker’s queue handler (async queue) is called and it is passed one or more messages.

In this example, your consumer Worker transforms the queue’s JSON formatted message back to a string and logs that output. In a real world application, your consumer Worker can be configured to write messages to object storage (such as R2), write to a database (like D1), or further process messages before calling an external API, such as an email API or a data warehouse with your legacy cloud provider.

​​ Connect the consumer Worker to your queue

After you have configured your consumer Worker, you are ready to connect it to your queue.

Each queue can only have one consumer Worker connected to it. If you try to connect multiple consumers to the same queue, you will encounter an error when attempting to publish that Worker.

To connect your queue to your consumer Worker, open your wrangler.toml file and add this to the bottom:

[[queues.consumers]]
 queue = "<YOUR_QUEUE_NAME>"
 # Required: this should match the name of the queue you created in step 3.
 # If you misspell the name, you will receive an error when attempting to publish your Worker.
 max_batch_size = 10 # optional: defaults to 10
 max_batch_timeout = 5 # optional: defaults to 5 seconds

Replace YOUR_QUEUE_NAME with the queue you created in step 3.

In your consumer Worker, you are using queues to auto batch messages using the max_batch_size option and the max_batch_timeout option. The consumer Worker will receive messages in batches of 10 or every 5 seconds, whichever happens first.

max_batch_size (defaults to 10) helps to reduce the amount of times your consumer Worker needs to be called. Instead of being called for every message, it will only be called after 10 messages have entered the queue.

max_batch_timeout (defaults to 5 seconds) helps to reduce wait time. If the producer Worker is not sending up to 10 messages to the queue for the consumer Worker to be called, the consumer Worker will be called every 5 seconds to receive messages that are waiting in the queue.

​​ Publish your consumer Worker

With your wrangler.toml file and index.ts file configured, publish your consumer Worker by running:

$ wrangler publish

​​ 6. Read messages from your queue

After you set up consumer Worker, you can read messages from the queue.

Run wrangler tail to start waiting for our consumer to log the messages it receives:

$ wrangler tail

With wrangler tail running, open the Worker URL you opened in step 4.

You should receive a Success message in your browser window.

If you receive a Success message, refresh the URL a few times to generate messages and push them onto the queue.

With wrangler tail running, your consumer Worker will start logging the requests generated by refreshing.

If you refresh less than 10 times, it may take a few seconds for the messages to appear because batch timeout is configured for 10 seconds. After 10 seconds, messages should arrive in your terminal.

If you get errors when you refresh, check that the queue name you created in step 3 and the queue you referenced in your wrangler.toml file is the same. You should ensure that your producer Worker is returning Success and is not returning an error.

By completing this guide, you have now created a queue, a producer Worker that publishes messages to that queue, and a consumer Worker that consumes those messages from it.

​​ Related resources

• Learn more about Cloudflare Workers and the applications you can build on Cloudflare.